BIG CAT: And Other Stories

by Gwyneth Jones

  I walked into a gallery on the outside of the building; a kind of conservatory, full of opulent plants. A figure moved among them. It turned and looked at me, with a knowing smirk that reminded me of Mr Raven. The shock was staggering. It looked at me, I looked at it: and I was no longer dreaming. I was awake, and my body was turned inside out. In the Schoolroom someone played the cello. In the City I, the same I, was looking at the red-grey, pulsing, twining, inside of my own skull. I saw myself: the way I was in its dimensions, like a string twisted the wrong way in every fibre. And it was one of Eliud’s little figures, actually one of them, but at home: a giant in its own world’s conditions.

  It came closer; in some sense (the shift was instantaneous). I felt its curiosity, then the sine-wave, ‘tentacle’ emanations engulfed me, a horrible feeling, and I was part of it. No more than gut bacteria, but still I was the alien, walking in the vast, convoluted, City; seeing others of my kind; and others of my race, the ovoids and the squares, but ovoid and square was nonsense now. I unrolled the score again, I played again. I heard the chiming, the chattering of children’s voices, a chorus distorted and rising. Revulsion and terror gripped me, as once in the wood, an alien disgust that took images from slime and vomit, from suffocation and strangling, from eyes put out, and a mouth full of earth—

  I dropped the bow. My cello fell with a crash. I stumbled to the sound desk, and stared at Christmas trees of vibration, propagating across the screens. I had dropped my bow, thrown down the instrument, but my part in the monstrosity continued. I could see it, twining there in the mix, and I couldn’t remove myself. I couldn’t stop this.

  I ran out of the room, and through the kitchen; Fenris’ claws clattering after me. I swooped down and grabbed him as I fled the house—

  I ran, the little dog silent and terrified in my arms, all the way up the track. When we reached the Flint Barn I set Fenris down, and looked back. The moon had vanished, the air felt thick and electric. From that slight elevation, under roiling clouds that covered the sky, charcoal veined with silver, I saw concavities in the prairie fields: the ghosts of old Hindey. In the hollow where St Iaad’s church had stood shadowy things struggled, like huge new-born animals in their birth-caul. I heard a friend’s voice muttering, he might knock down a few hovels, but what kind of landowner razes a church, Aiode? The little dog pressed against my ankles, shivering, and Hindey Playground went on unfolding its horrible music; in the distance, and inside my skull. The City was rising, in all its immensity, filling me with awful, sickening terror—

  ∆

  I woke up in Eliud’s bed, missing Fenris’s warm small weight at my feet. My head ached. I couldn’t remember if I’d finished playing the piece. Thank God Eliud wasn’t here. Whatever he meant by his new work, he’d be disgusted if he knew about my hippy-dippy hallucinations.

  In the kitchen I found an empty red wine bottle, a glass, and no sign that a meal had been eaten: which explained the throbbing head, and the memory lapse! In the Schoolroom there was confusion. The score was intact, but my photos were gone, and somebody had been burning treated paper in the fireplace. I set things to rights (thankfully nothing was damaged); I put my cello back in its case. I ate breakfast, drank strong coffee, and resumed my task of sorting Eliud’s papers.

  Deflated, hollowed out, I didn’t check the playback. I didn’t try, then or later, to resume my performance of Hindey Playground. I felt I’d woken from a long, exhausting dream; it was over, and now I would let somebody else decide what the new work was worth. When I was packing up the Hindey Playground material, I noticed that the dusty label on the score tube, Aiode, was in Renton’s handwriting, not Eliud’s; which seemed strange, but I didn’t dwell on the puzzle. Everything went into the box labelled ‘Unfinished Works’ – which was by no means empty!

  I stayed out of the narrow wood. I made my nightly trek up to the Barn, but there was never any signal, for some reason. Good news, bad news; or (most likely) no news, would have to wait until I got home. I taped the boxes. I called the removal firm; left a voicemail, telling them everything was ready to pick up, and I drove away.

  I drove away: heading for the local market town, to leave the keys with Eliud’s house agent. It was another dull, dusty, end of summer day; like the day I’d arrived. A mile or so down the road I glanced in my rear mirror and saw the cello case, all alone.

  I had left Fenris behind! How the hell did that happen!

  I slammed on the brakes: luckily the country road was empty behind me. I pulled over, my heart hammering. Calm down, I told myself. When did you last see him? When had I last seen Fenris? Why did that question make my hands shake, why did it sicken me? Think, think. All I could remember was Eliud on the phone, that conversation when he asked me to come to Norfolk. He was whispering, his voice sounded hoarse and strange. I remembered wondering was there somebody with him, wondering if it was Renton, of all people; and then nothing more. Then I was driving to Norfolk… But when had I last seen Fenris? I couldn’t think, I just started to shake.

  Thankfully I still had the keys.

  I sped back to the Old Schoolhouse. I called him. He wasn’t in the house. I ran around searching, calling for him, getting frantic, and at last I heard him bark.

  Beyond my parking place, greenery had overwhelmed the drive. I fought my way to the end, vaguely puzzled by signs that someone had busted through the tangles before me, and there was the white caravan: where it must have been standing derelict since the big fight; since Renton walked out. Fenris was barking right in front of me, but he was invisible. He must be inside. How could he be inside? I dragged at bindweed, scalded my hands on nettles and thorns, an icy sweat running down my spine. I forced the door to open, and saw what Fenris had been trying to show me, ever since I arrived—

  Renton’s narrow bed, that I had never shared (the Caravan was his very private place). A shelf of cobwebbed books, a mouldering kitchenette, and a great big withered doll, tumbled on the floor, dressed in rags that I partly recognised. I fell to my knees. I heard Eliud whispering that although he was my lover, there were parts of Mike Renton that I had never seen; and now I believed it. His merman’s eyes, his tarnished-gold hair, were gone. All gone, the warm flesh that had masked this doll’s strange bones, the unhuman declivities; cusps and protuberances—

  “Now you see how it was…” said Mr Raven, behind me. “Your boyfriend, he was Hindey bred from a long time back, same as the old man; same as me. Anyone could see by looking at them; if they knew the signs. But Eliud was too human to want to be Hindey bred. Mike Renton, he was better endowed, if you take my meaning. He was a feller with a mission. Only he didn’t have the power to carry it out, and the other lad, the one that didn’t want the great ones: he did. So Mike, he got his hooks into Eliud, called him a genius, and convinced him to write the music. For the pure strangeness of it; as Eliud believed. When he figured out what Renton was really after, that’s when Eliud told you your boyfriend had to go. And you didn’t take too much persuading, did you Aiode? You don’t remember what you did? Righto, I suppose you wouldn’t. You’d bury a deed like that—”

  I didn’t remember, but the memories were there, trying to crawl out of the fog in my head, kept from me by silted earth and stinging thorns, and what a brutal thing it was, the old man and me; or had everyone gone, was it me alone, hacking away. But there was another, much smaller heap of bones, and maybe Renton was a monster, and maybe I hated him, but whatever I told myself, oh, the little dog too! Poor little Fenris! How could I have done that, how could I?

  “He wouldn’t stop barking.”

  “Didn’t do you fools any good, though,” Mr Raven continued, with satisfaction. “You didn’t change a thing, and Mike Renton he didn’t care. He’s not gone far. An’ he knew you’d be back here, when the time was ripe. You’d do what was needed, thinking you were following your master’s orders, silly bitch. So you’ve opened the way; Eliud’s gone, along with a whole parcel of other lower forms, and it’s becoming
their world again. Don’t you feel it?”

  I didn’t turn my head. I didn’t want to find out if Mr Raven was real, or if he’d never existed. I stared at the dog’s poor little bones, and the other remains, and Renton’s skeleton did look strange, but how could I tell what was real? How could I explain to myself how this had happened, why it had happened, even as my lover’s mummified corpse began to stir and fatten, and the terrible city rose, and the world was ending—

  I didn’t know, I didn’t know.

  The Ki-Anna

  “The Ki-anna” and “The Vicar Of Mars” are two stories set in the “Aleutian” universe, first posited in a serious, feminist-politics motivated nineties trilogy (White Queen, North Wind, Phoenix Café); first described in a fourth novel, Spirit. There are a handful of humanoid inhabited planets, united by the Buonarotti Transit, a means of faster than light travel devised by a German physicist called Peenemunde Buonarotti, in White Queen. The Diaspora Parliament is their government/UN; the political centre is a transformed asteroid in our outer solar system, known as ‘Speranza’. The important social divide now is not binary gender (or more drastic cultural divisions), but the gap between ‘Speranza’ and the Blues, (Earth humans) who dominate there, and mere planet-dweller humans/humanoids. In “The Ki-Anna” an attempt to correct gruesome ‘traditional practices’ on one of the Diaspora planets has ended very badly, but mighty reparations are being made…

  I wrote “The Ki-anna” for the ‘Engineering’ volume of Jonathan Strahan’s legendary Infinity series. But what with the industrialised cannibalism, the cop show, and all that, nobody noticed my mega-engineering ‘atmosphere recovery’, or even my ‘troposphere reconstruction’; of which I was rather proud.

  If he’d been at home, he’d have thought: Dump Plant Injuries. In the socially unbalanced, pioneer cities of the Martian Equatorial Ring, little scavengers tangled with the recycling machinery. They needed premium, Earthatmosphericpressure nursing, which they didn’t get; or the flesh would not regenerate. So the gouges and dents were permanent: skinned over, like the scars on the police chief’s forearms; visible through thin clothing, like the depressions in her thighs. But this wasn’t Mars, and she wasn’t human, she was a Ki. He guessed, uneasily, at more horrifying forms of childhood poverty.

  She seemed very young for her post: hardly more than a girl. She could almost have been a human girl with gene-mods. Could have chosen to adopt that fine pelt of silky bronze, glimmering against the bare skin of her palms, her throat and face. Chosen those eyes, like drops of black dew; the hint of a mischievous animal muzzle. Her name was Ki-anna, and she represented the KiAn authorities. Her partner, a Shet called Roaaat Bhvaaan, his heavy uniform making no concession to the warmth of the space-habitat, was from Interplanetary Affairs, and represented Speranza. The Shet looked far more alien: a head like a grey boulder, naked wrinkled hide hooding his eyes.

  Patrice didn’t expect them to be on his side, this odd couple, polite and sympathetic as they seemed. He must be careful, he must remember that his mind and body were still reeling from the Buonarotti Transit – two instantaneous interstellar transits in two days, the first in his life. He’d never seen a non-human sentient biped in person, this time last week; and here he was in a stark, police interview room with two of them.

  “You learned of your sister’s death a Martian year ago?”

  “Her disappearance. Yes.”

  Ki-anna watched, Bhvaaan questioned. Patrice wished it were the other way round. He dreaded the Speranza mind-set. Anyone who lives on a planet is a lesser form of life, of course we’re going to ignore your appeals, but it’s more fun to ignore them slowly, very, very slowly—

  “We can agree she disappeared,” muttered the Shet, what might be mordant humour tugging the lipless trap of his mouth. “Yet, aaah, you didn’t voice your concerns at once?”

  “Lione is, was, my twin. We were close, however far… When the notification of death came it was very brief, I didn’t take it in. A few days later I collapsed at work, I had to take compassionate leave.”

  At first he’d accepted the official story. She’s dead, Lione is dead. She went into danger, it shouldn’t have happened but it did, on a suffering war-torn planet unimaginably far away…

  The Shet rolled his neckless head, possibly in sympathy.

  “You’re aahh, Social Knowledge Officer. Thap must be a demanding job. No blame if a loss to your family caused you to crash-out.”

  “I recovered. I examined the material that had arrived while I was ill: everything about my sister’s last expedition, and the investigation. I knew there was something wrong. I couldn’t achieve anything at a distance. I had to get to Speranza, I had to get myself here—”

  “Quite right, child. Can’t do anything at long distance, aaah.”

  “I needed financial support, and the system is slow. The Buonarotti Transit network isn’t for people like me—” He wished he’d bitten that back. “I mean, it’s for officials, diplomats, not civilian planet-dwellers.”

  “Unless they’re idle super-rich,” rumbled the Shet. “Or refugees getting shipped out of a hellhole, maybe. Well, you persisted. Your sister was Martian too. What was she doing here?”

  Patrice looked at the very slim file on the table. No way of telling if that tablet held a ton of documents or a single page.

  “Don’t you know?”

  “Explain to us,’ said Ki-anna. Her voice was sibilant, a hint of a lisp.

  “Lione was a troposphere engineer. She was working on the KiAn Atmosphere Recovery Project. But you must know…” They waited, silently. “All right. The KiAn war practically flayed this planet. The atmosphere’s being repaired, it’s a major Speranza project. Out here it’s macro-engineering. They’ve created a – a kind of membrane, like a casting mould, of magnetically charged particles. They’re shepherding small water-ice asteroids and other debris with useful constituents, through it; into a zone around the planet. Controlled annihilation releases the gases, bonding and venting propagates the right mix. Martians pioneered the technique. We’ve enriched our own atmosphere the same way… but nothing like the scale of this. The job also has to be done from the bottom up. The troposphere, the lowest level of the inner atmosphere, is alive. It’s a saturated fluid full of viruses, fragments of DNA and RNA, amino acids; metabolising mineral traces, pre-biotic chemistry. The mix is unique to a living planet, and it’s like the mycorrhizal systems in the soil, back on Earth. If it isn’t there, or it’s not right, nothing will thrive.”

  He couldn’t tell if they knew all this, or didn’t understand a word.

  “The tropo reconstruction wasn’t going well. Lionel found out there was an area of the surface, under the An-lalhar Lakes, where the living layer might be undamaged. This – where we are now – is the Orbital Refuge Habitat for that region. She came out here, determined to get permission from the Ruling An to collect samples—”

  Ki-anna interrupted softly. “Isn’t the surviving troposphere remotely sampled by Project automats, all over the planet?”

  “Yes, but obviously not well enough. That was Lione. If it was her responsibility she had to do everything in her power to get the job done.”

  “Aah. Raarpht… Your sister befriended the Ruling An, she gained permission, she went down, she stepped on a landmine. You understand that there was no body to be recovered? She was vaporised?”

  “So I was told.”

  Ki-anna rubbed her scarred forearms; the Shet studied Patrice. The room was haunted by Transit ghosts, shadowy with secret intent—

  “Aaap. You need to make a ‘pilgrimage’. A memorial journey?”

  “No, it’s not like that. There’s something wrong.”

  The shadows were tight, the two aliens had made up their minds already: but were they for him or against him?

  “Lione disappeared. I don’t speak any KiAn language; I didn’t have to, the reports were in English: and when I needed more detail there are translator bots. I have not
missed anything. A vaporised body does not vanish. All that tissue, blood and bones, leaves forensic traces. None. No samples were recovered. She was there to collect samples, so don’t tell me it was forbidden. She didn’t come back, that’s all I know. Something happened to her, something other than a warzone accident—”

  “Are you saying your sister was murdered, Patrice?”

  “I need to go down there.”

  “I can see you’d feel thap way. You realise KiAn is uninhabitable?”

  “A lot of places on Mars are called uninhabitable. My work takes me to the worst-off regions. I can handle myself.”

  “Aaap. How do you feel about the KiAn issue, Messer Ferringhi?”

  Patrice opened his mouth, and shut it. He didn’t have a prepared answer for that one. “I don’t know enough.”

  The Shet and the Ki looked at each other, for the first time. He felt they’d been through the motions, and they were agreeing to quit.

  “As you know,” rumbled Bhvaan, “the Ruling An must give permission. The An-he will see you?”

  “I have an appointment.”

  “Then thap’s all for now. Enjoy your transit hangover in peace.”

  Patrice Ferringhi took a moment, looking puzzled, before he realised he could go. He stood, hesitated, gave an odd little bow and left the room. The Shet and the Ki relaxed somewhat.

  “Collapsed at work,” said Roaaat Bhvaan. “Thap’s not good.”

  “We can’t all be made of stone, Shet.”

  “Aaah well. Cross fingers, Chief.”

  They were resigned to strange English figures of speech. The language of Speranza, of diplomacy, was also the language of interplanetary policing. You became fluent, or you relied on unreliable transaid, and you screwed up.

  “And all my toes,” said the Ki.

  On his way to his cabin, Patrice found an Ob-bay. He stared into a hollow sphere, permeated by the star-pricked darkness of KiAn system space: the limb of the planet obscured; the mainstar and the blue ‘daystar’ out of sight. Knurled objects flew around, suddenly making endless field-beams visible. One lump rushed straight at him, growing huge, and seemed to miss the ob-bay by centimetres, with a roar like monstrous thunder. The big impacts were close enough to make this Refuge shake. He’d felt that, already. Like the Gods throwing giant furniture about—